But the new laws were already having an effect on the health-care system. Across Texas, residency applications in ob-gyn dropped significantly. Data from the Gender Equity Policy Institute revealed a fifty-six-per-cent spike in maternal deaths in the state between 2019 and 2022. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas was no longer an outlier; in the weeks after the ruling, thirteen states moved to ban abortion.
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Texas authorities are not keeping track of the exodus of doctors, at least not officially. Yet among practitioners there is a quiet sense of doom. “The pipeline is drying up,” Charles Brown, a maternal-fetal expert and a former Texas regional chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said. A growing number of residents who trained in the state were leaving, Brown told me, and many established doctors were contemplating it, too. “We’re just not going to have enough people to take care of women in this state,” he said.
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